By: Paul Winter

Paul Winter — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 13:01:19 +0000

I must beg to differ, Rabbi. Isolating one’s group is anti-social and while it may be a reaction to an hostile host community, that cannot be the case in most Western nations and certainly not in Israel. There is no excuse for dressing like European cults following one or other rabbi. There is no excuse for evading military service; my wife’s very religious second cousins did community service and their husbands serve in elite combat unit. There is no excuse for shirking work and spending all day studying talmud; European hassids in shtetls worked and supported their families. Worse still, their representatives have got themselves into positions of power where they blackmail Israeli governments into funding schools where only talmud is taught and they control ministries dealing with marriages and conversions applying the most rigid, most pitiless interpretations of torah and demanding that all Israeli Jews conform to those standards. They hassids need to open the doors of the both their minds and the doors of their self imposed ghettos.

Comments on: Why do many Chassidic groups isolate themselves from the modern world?…ask the rabbi

By: Paul Winter